


The gates of this Chapel were shut

by lagardère (laurore)



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - His Dark Materials Fusion, F/M, Jon is an explorer, Sansa is an Oxford scholar, the daemon aren't wolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-21
Updated: 2019-05-21
Packaged: 2020-03-07 14:25:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18875020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laurore/pseuds/lagard%C3%A8re
Summary: Jon must have said something to her in parting, but Sansa couldn’t remember what it was. “Take care,” or, “You’ll be safe here.” Both these things sounded very Jon-like, reasonable and caring and completely missing the point.





	The gates of this Chapel were shut

**Author's Note:**

> This is a repost of a fic written in 2017 for [septmars](https://archiveofourown.org/users/septmars/pseuds/septmars), as part of the Alternate Songs exchange. septmars wasn't fond of ASOIAF AUs + daemons, but wasn't opposed to an ASOIAF AU set in the world of His Dark Materials.
> 
> Therefore this fic contains:  
> \- Oxford, or rather Pullman’s Oxford  
> \- Daemons, the animal-shaped manifestation of a character’s soul/psyche/conscience  
> \- Most of the other strange things/beings that populate Pullman’s world (armoured bears, witches, golden compasses that are both instruments of truth and of divination, the Church as a malevolent, all powerful entity, the desperate search for, and perhaps existence of, other worlds).
> 
> I THINK this is readable without any knowledge of His Dark Materials. I tried to make it so.
> 
> The title is from William Blake’s poem The Garden of Love.
> 
> This fic has undergone some proper editing before reposting, and I threw together an [edit](https://ferrame.tumblr.com/post/185047724508/the-gates-of-this-chapel-were-shut-jon-snow-x) on tumblr :).

**1\. The alethiometer**

 

“You promised!” Sansa said.

It sounded far too childish for her liking, as if she’d been reproaching her brother for stealing her favourite toy.

“I’m sorry.”

Bran did not sound in the least bit sorry. That was the problem with people who were never wrong: they didn’t have much to feel guilty about.

Sansa had come to meet him at Balliol College, in his small room next to the library, where they let him take the alethiometer after hours to study it by the light of his naphtha lamp. Or at least, Sansa assumed that Bran had permission. She hoped he did, and that he didn’t merely lift the precious instrument out of its velvet casing, night after night, unbeknownst to the college fellows.

Bran hadn’t put it back yet and the alethiometer sat on the table before him, a large golden compass with an enamel surface, exquisitely painted. Laid out next to each other, the little figures looked like the hours around the face of a clock. Bran’s daemon, a large crow with feathers as black as pitch, was perched upon the side of the compass, standing eerily still, as his human so often did.

Sansa’s own daemon had fled to a higher shelf. There were times when Sansa almost resented Kyria’s ability to avoid unpleasant conversations simply by flying away. But she knew that the distance was a trick, too, a way to let Kyria spy on things unnoticed.

“The alethiometer doesn’t always answer the question I’d been asking,” Bran tried to explain, his serious face lifted up to her, his brown eyes almost black in the yellow glow of the naphtha lamp. “Sometimes it answers a question it thinks I should have been asking, and it won’t move on until I’ve worked out what it was.”

“You make it sound like it’s almost sentient,” Sansa remarked, a little in spite of herself.

There was no working around the fact that the alethiometer was a fascinating tool. Sometimes she wished that she had Bran’s talent to decipher it. Most scholars who took an interest in the instrument needed a lifetime to even begin to master the many layers of meaning behind each symbol, and yet, by the age of ten, Bran could read the alethiometer as fluently as others did the stars or the colourful cards of a tarot deck. It became more difficult - less instinctive - as he grew up, but he was determined to perfect his understanding of the instrument’s strange language.

As soon as their family had discovered his abilities, and as soon as the Stark siblings came to understand what the alethiometer was, that is to say, a means to learn the truth, uncomfortable as it may be - they had forbidden Bran to ever ask it any question about them.

And yet here Sansa was, wearing the black gown that she had put on to attend a formal dinner at her college, her cheeks still red from the cold, waiting to hear what the alethiometer had to say about her.

“It can be very persistent,” Bran said softly. His fingers traced the edge of the compass’s face, almost reverently.

“It would be a mistake not to listen to what it has to say,” Bran’s daemon added, in that soft rustle of a voice that Sansa usually found very calming.

“Tell us, then,” she said, her face set. She almost started tapping her foot. “I’m supposed to attend a formal at St Sophia’s... Ten minutes ago.”

Bran followed her eyes towards the clock above the mantelpiece.

“Alright,” he said. “So the needle kept stopping on the bird... That’s how I knew it meant you. It’s the symbol I would have picked for you, and I think the alethiometer chose it because... Because it knew. And then...” He pointed towards the symbols in succession, as if he expected her to follow his finger around the compass, despite the lack of light. “The Madonna, the Serpent, the Helmet, the Sword. I’m not quite sure about the Madonna, but it could be related to you, and to St Sophia’s, since it’s a female college. The Serpent seems to imply some kind of betrayal... That you might counter with the Helmet. Protection. The needle stopped on the Griffin a few times, though not on every reading... That would be watchfulness. I think you need to be careful.”

Sansa stared at him, at a loss what to say.

Kyria intervened in her place. It was something he was very good at - observing from afar, piping up when needed with some vital piece of information that Sansa had missed. She’d have felt somewhat stupid if she didn’t know that Kyria was a part of her. A bird-shaped piece of her soul, wilful and soft and exposed to the world.

“And the Sword?” he asked.

“I’m not sure,” Bran admitted. “I wanted to work on it some more, but this felt urgent, and I think the alethiometer was being a little reproachful as well, as if it thought I was asking too much.”

“Reproachful?” Sansa snorted. “It’s not a _person_ , Bran.”

“Hm,” Bran said, with a shrug of his narrow shoulders. “I know. Sometimes it feels more like a multitude of beings.”

This was not what Sansa had meant, but she refrained from pointing that out. Sometimes, it felt like Bran was operating on a plane completely separate from her own.

“Paired with the Helmet, the Sword could indicate war. An assault, maybe something more personal. But its third meaning is the Church... And we both know the Church is none too fond of you...”  
Sansa snorted again.

“I’ve hardly done anything to offence the Magisterium. If anything, they’re the ones who refuse to let me go north again.”

“Because you turned the bears against them.”

“I did not. I’m a linguist, not a spy! It’s not my fault if the Church is encroaching on the bears’ territory... I went to Svalbard to study their language, not to manipulate them. And we’re lucky I was there at the time, because Jon would be dead otherwise.”

Though there were many reasons why Sansa would always remember her journey to the north, one particular memory generally stood out from the rest.

A door giving way under her hand, and in the hall before her knelt her brave, moody cousin. Jon the royal bastard and the explorer, bowed before an executioner’s block. Behind him, a bear clad in a dented iron armour prepared to bring down his axe. Everything was hushed, at least in Sansa’s recollection of the scene. The rough-hewn ice of the walls, the slippery ice of the floor. The north seemed to be holding its icy breath, waiting to see what she would do.

“Jon,” Bran murmured, thoughtful. “Yes. You’re right. The Sword can also be fortitude, rigour...”

“What do you mean?”

Bran didn’t answer. He was gazing intently down at the compass, where a thin needle was jumping fast from one symbol to the next.

“I think you should go,” he said, at last. “I think you should go _now_.”

 

 

 

 

**2\. A formal hall**

 

“Is this about the north?” Kyria asked Sansa as they hurried towards St Sophia, the little snow bunting flying fast to keep up with her long strides.

“It could be.”

Kyria was little more than a bobbing shadow, except when they passed a lamppost. Then the gas light would turn his white belly a creamy yellow and draw forth golden hues from his brown wings. As they rounded another corner and came upon a windy street, Sansa crossed her arms over her gown to try and keep herself warm. Winter wasn’t there yet, but it would be soon. Already the trees in the gardens of St Sophia had lost their leaves.

And yet, for all that it might be dreary in this season, the landscape was still tamed. At times, Sansa found comfort in the broad, irregular stones of the college walls, in the walled gardens and the bells that summoned you to dinner, in the return of birds in the spring and the garden parties in the summer. Falling asleep in the library, throwing on her gown to rush down to the dining hall, or meeting her siblings at the train station for a lazy afternoon spent strolling in the sunshine. At one point she had even had marriage prospects, but that had not lasted, and at twenty-four she liked to hope that, perhaps, London society would leave her to her own devices. She had been engaged a grand total of ten hours, which culminated with a screaming match in the street and her intended’s hand slapping her hard across the cheek.

Sansa had retreated to Oxford, to her books and her walled garden. They did not call her a spinster yet, in part, she knew, because they were still too busy calling her pretty. “Too pretty to be wasted so”, which was something she’d heard in London but also, at times, in Oxford. She wasn’t blind. She knew she wouldn’t find a perfect refuge in books and public talks and in the weekly tea parties of the Oxford Association of Female Scholars.

Oxford could be cosy and warm. It could also be stifling and drab. And sometimes she resented the faint chill that now had her hiding her hands in the sleeves of her gown. Even the cold was tamed in these parts. It had nothing on the soul-slicing winds of the far north.

Sansa had only been north once. It was inevitable, for one who studied the panserbjørne: there weren’t many armoured bears to be found beneath the arctic circle. Yet obtaining the authorisation to go had been a tedious process, in part because Sansa was a linguist, and not an explorer. For the most part however, it had to do with her being a woman. She had had to sit through countless interviews and to seek many an old, benevolent sponsor. Talks and more talks and the occasional bribe. She knew the power of language to turn around a man’s head, but that wouldn’t have been enough to convince the state, and the Magisterium, which controlled the state. Some caved in because they believed in the validity of her research. Others, because she was a “charming young woman,” and they saw a return on their investment down the line. The harbour authorities in Trollesund had taken her money. And the bears themselves... The bears had been far easier to read than the men. They were powerful and dangerous, but they didn’t plot and scheme behind your back. They didn’t covet. They hunted and killed and fought and fed. After months spent navigating treacherous waters, Sansa could appreciate their clarity of purpose.

Until that journey to the Arctic, Sansa had never considered herself to be the adventurous type. And suddenly she was spending weeks on end on a rusty boat, and days buried under piles of furs at the back of a sledge, watching the slender black silhouettes of the sled dogs and, when the sky was clear and she could bear to pull back her hood a little, peering up at the myriad stars in the clear arctic sky. She came across belligerent Tartars and more amenable hunters with whom she learned to trade; she saw the green lights of the aurora borealis, hanging up the threads of foreign worlds in the sky. She glimpsed the dark shapes of witches beneath the clouds, flying towards the horizon. And she had talked her way inside the bear king’s hall - she had been treated like a guest of honour by the bears, she had studied their customs and shared their food and slept in the shadow of their frightening armours and their powerful teeth and claws.

She had swallowed down her fear and stood her ground in front of the bear king, though Kyria trembled against her breast and she had to fight against herself not to cower. The king rose several feet above her. His carved chestplate glinted in the light of the torches. When Sansa tore her gaze away from his small black eyes, she would find herself looking down at his claws, each of them sharp and several inches long. And she’d lied - lied through her teeth to try and save the life of the man kneeling behind her, his dark head bowed in mock submission.

Once they had left Svalbard, the Church had been on their heels. From the frozen deserts of the north to the grey streets of London; always the distant buzz of a zeppelin, and the closer, far more worrying tap of cautious feet, running alongside them in the shadows.

“We never found out why the Magisterium was after Jon,” Kyria said, forever attuned to her thoughts.

“We asked him,” Sansa reminded him. “He wouldn’t answer.” 

“He said it would be safer if we didn’t know.”

“They did leave us alone,” she remarked.

Ahead of them, she could see the walls of St Sophia, and beneath them the river and above them the moon, round and pale and hanging precariously over the gardens, as if it might just tumble out of the sky the moment Sansa stopped looking.

“Bran’s warning might be nothing,” she said. “People betray each other all the time. Maybe Lettie Montcliff will publish her article on Slavic languages before I can iron mine out. Maybe someone will take the last slice of apple pie before we get to the hall. It doesn’t have to be... life or death.”

“You don’t believe that,” Kyria said.

He didn’t sound judgemental. In fact, he sounded afraid, and though she wouldn’t admit it out loud, it made Sansa afraid, too.

When they reached the main building, she turned away from the large oak doors to slip in through the service entrance. Dinner must have already begun. If Dame Olenna had finished saying grace, Sansa might be able to scurry to the end of one of the benches.

It was a quick walk through an entryway, along a corridor and then into the small parlour next to the dining hall. Yet before Sansa could step inside the parlour, Kyria flew back and halted her on the threshold, his wings beating an inch away from her face.

“People.”

Sansa leaned towards the door and listened. Had it been shut, she wouldn’t have heard a thing, for it was ten inches thick and made of solid oak. The last person to walk in, however, had neglected to close it properly.

“...so handsome, and you’ll be sitting right next to him, professor!” 

“Don’t be so trivial,” retorted a clipped voice.

“Elma,” Kyria whispered in Sansa’s ear.

Professor Elma Mull had been in Sansa’s year when she was still a student at St Sophia’s. Elma had gone on to become a professor, while Sansa had yet to obtain the title. She had been about to present the results of her research when the professor who tutored her had decided she would rather not do so anymore. Sansa thought the Church might have got to her. Maybe that wasn’t the case and, as the old lady had told her, she was simply too tired and eager to retire.

“Whenever we receive a male scholar, the same thing happens,” Elma sighed. “The whole college becomes this gaggle of geese...”

“He’s not just any old scholar!” the other woman protested. One of the younger students, judging by her voice. “He’s an _explorer_. And a lord and almost a prince.”

“They call him Lord Snow as a joke,” Elma said. “He’s a bastard. He has no title. You would do better to focus on what he has to say about the state of London politics. You must know that our funding comes from the House of Lords, and the patronage of past students, and if the rumours are true and there is going to be a war...”

“If there’s to be a war, I might as well be merry until it comes,” the student decided. “Maybe when you’re done eating, you can ask Lord Snow if he’d take a walk in the gardens with me. It’s not often we have _men_ here, or at least, men who aren’t all stooped like that rotten old gardener.”

“If there’s a war, it’s your duty to prepare for it,” Elma said peremptorily. 

“The Magisterium wouldn’t let it happen, though, would it? They...” 

“Don’t speak so loud,” a voice hissed.

It must have been Elma’s daemon, a marmot that neither Sansa nor Kyria got along with. He was too much of a know-it-all. During their first year at college, he used to always speak out of turn.  
Sansa and Kyria looked at each other.

“Lord Snow,” Sansa mouthed.

There weren’t many people that could be, not with the qualifiers used. And the girl - who she now thought must be Yvette, a second-year with a dizzying hummingbird daemon - had said Jon was here, in Oxford.

She thought of when she’d seen him last - outside the doors of the college, his coat and hair and beard dripping, because they had just pulled themselves out of the canal. His daemon slunk in and out of the shadows beneath the porch, her beautiful fur shining beneath the gas lamps, made bright and sleek by the water.

Jon must have said something to her in parting, but Sansa couldn’t remember what it was. “Take care,” or, “You’ll be safe here.” Both these things sounded very Jon-like, reasonable and caring and completely missing the point, because she wasn’t safe and she doubted she ever would be again - and because this was no way to part with someone who had saved your life, and with whom you’d shared a frantic escape across thousands of miles of frozen ice and frozen tundra.

“He doesn’t want to worry about you,” Jon’s daemon had told Sansa, and Kyria had answered, from where she’d perched upon the lid of the gas light.

“That’s alright. We don’t want to think about you, either.”

Sansa pushed the door, stepping inside the parlour. Badly startled, Yvette’s hummingbird veered off into a lopsided circle, but Elma’s dull-coloured marmot didn’t so much as twitch. Kyria’s wings flapped by Sansa’s ear, accompanying the snow bunting’s whisper, “Watch out.”

“I lost track of time,” Sansa said. “Has dinner started yet?” 

“I should think so,” Elma replied.

She was shorter than Sansa, and prompt to lift her chin in defiance whenever they came across each other. Next to Elma, Sansa never failed to feel like she was too much: too tall, her hair too bright a  
red, her eyes too chilly a blue.

“Lord Snow is your cousin, isn’t he?” Elma said. “That must be why Dame Olenna asked for you to be seated at the high table with us. Not the best evening to arrive late. Didn’t you know he was coming?”

“Lord Snow is your cousin?” Yvette echoed, hands fluttering as fast as her daemon’s wings.

Sansa narrowed her eyes at Elma. She couldn’t ask what Jon was doing here without revealing that she hadn’t been warned of his visit. Her daemon flew down to the marmot and the marmot lazily batted a paw at it.

Sansa swallowed her irritation.

“I’ll be happy to see him,” she said.

“You and everyone else,” Elma muttered, rolling her eyes.

When Sansa, Elma and Yvette slipped into the hall, dinner was well underway. Dame Olenna had indeed set aside a place for Sansa at the high table. There were two empty chairs between Jon and Professor Muston. Sansa, like most of the other students at St Sophia’s, had only ever called the professor “Dear Old Musty”.

Sansa and Elma walked between the two long tables with most of the students and scholars staring at them. Elma walked fast ahead. Sansa followed at a more sedate pace, distracted by the incongruous sight of Jon sitting at the high table, the only man in a room full of women. The last time a man had been invited to a formal hall at St Sophia’s, it had been the young rector of Jordan College; one of Dame Olenna’s nephews. Sansa could remember him picking at his food. Large forehead, pinched mouth. He wasn’t handsome and he wasn’t funny, not even dryly and a little cruelly funny like Jon could be. And still his visit had caused a stir. The girls Sansa tutored had been talking about it for weeks.

Oh, Jon would be the talk of the college for at least a year.

Elma climbed the few steps to the high table. Then, taking advantage of Sansa’s distraction, she walked up to Sansa’s designated place at Jon’s side and sat down in the tall-backed chair.  
This sleight of hand was so unexpected that Sansa’s step faltered.

“Keep walking,” Kyria told her.

There was little to do but to obey. Sansa walked the rest of the way to the high table and there she sat herself between Elma and Professor Muston. She didn’t confront Elma. What would she have said, anyways? _I believe you’re sitting in my chair?_ She’d never been one to make a scene. Her mother had taught her, early on, that one should always rise above petty provocations.

Jon leaned around Elma to try to catch Sansa’s eye. Compared to the last time she’d seen him, he looked polished and a little unfamiliar, his beard trimmed and with a sheen of red wine to his lips. Sansa remembered him tired and unkempt, his face void of colour except for a red slash close to his right eye, where the eagle daemon of a Samoyed hunter had clawed at him. The wound had healed since she’d seen him last, leaving behind the faint line of a scar.

Perhaps he was thinking the same about her: that she’d changed, and that he knew her no longer.

Some of her misgivings must have shown on her face, for Jon gave her a swift, reassuring smile.

Sansa knew well enough that his smiles were to be treasured. He’d been a sulky child, and as he grew up the sulkiness matured into melancholy, and a soft kind of thoughtfulness that could hide dangerous depths. Jon was hardly a paragon of virtue. He was stubborn and wilful and it was better not to occur his displeasure. _A sharp tongue can cause wounds far more lethal than a sharp blade_ , her mother used to say. But all of this fell away when Jon smiled. It made him look vulnerable, perhaps even tamed.

Sansa looked around, but she didn’t see Fan. She must have been curled up beneath the table.

Most daemons chose their final shape when their human was between twelve and fourteen years of age. Jon’s daemon had settled late, later than Kyria, although Jon was three years older than Sansa. Once she had, Sansa had found herself prey to all kinds of shameful impulses. She wanted Fan to come close, and rub herself against her legs. She wanted her to jump into her lap and settle there, warming her thighs. And what was worse, a thousand times worse, Sansa sometimes had to resist the impulse to reach out and stroke Fan’s fur. It was the most indecent thought she’d ever had, for one did not touch another’s daemon - one should not even _fantasise_ about it. But Fan was uncommonly beautiful, with her familiar fox-figure and that jarring colour, silver blending into charcoal, charcoal blending into black. Sansa would tell herself that she couldn’t be the only one.

 _I want to shoot fox like this_ , a hunter had told Jon once, in a broken mixture of English and the Slavic tongue. The man had dogs and a sledge and Jon and Sansa had hoped to barter for them, as a means of travelling back south. _Do you know how much they give me, for pelt like this one?_

It was a stupid thing to say, of course. If the hunter or anyone else had shot Fan, she’d have vanished into thin air, and Jon would have died at the exact same time. But it was a fact that in any cold city, there lived rich women who’d have paid good money to wrap the fur of a black fox around their pale, desiccated necks.

“... chirping like so many birds in a cage,” Old Musty was saying on Sansa’s right, as she looked kindly upon the students seated closest to the high table. The girls couldn’t seem to take their eyes off Jon. To be fair to them, however, there wasn’t much to be seen on the table in front of them: stale bread and bowl of dark pea soup.

On Sansa’s left, Elma was telling Jon a story about Samoyeds and engraved belt buckles. Every now and then, Elma broke off bits of her bread crust and handed them down for the marmot to play with.

“Why do you think he’s here?” Kyria asked in a thin whisper. Sansa lifted a shoulder. _I don’t know._

“It can’t be money,” Kyria said, perfectly happy to pursue the conversation on his own. “St Sophia can barely feed its students, we’re not about to fund expeditions to the Arctic.”

“... and I had been looking forward to talking to you, because there’s only so much books can teach me,” Elma was telling Jon. “With your extensive knowledge of the Poles...”

“I wish someone would strangle her,” Kyria whispered, in that same even, reasonable tone. Sansa almost laughed.

On Jon’s other side, Dame Olenna leaned forward and gave Sansa a slow nod of acknowledgement. Her daemon, a bumblebee, was perched upon the rim of her wine glass.

Sansa returned the nod.

“She’s making a statement by having him here,” Kyria remarked. “He’s no friend of the Church, and to receive him in a college full of women? She looks really proud of herself.”

“She looks cunning,” Sansa said under her breath. “She always does.”

The old lady returned to her plate of filet and roasted potatoes, superior by far to the fare the girls had been given. Sansa tried to swallow a bite of her own potatoes, but apprehension was clogging her throat.

As the meal wore on, Elma began to lean further away from her, and closer to Jon. Sansa couldn’t see Jon’s face, or hear more than a few words of their conversation. Something  
about Samoyed culture, an article Elma wanted to write. Sansa had carefully avoided Professor Muston’s regular offers of wine, but she felt drunk all the same, high-strung and dizzy and disoriented. She found it hard to focus on anything amidst the buzzing of voices and the smell of wine and gravy and burnt soup and the too thick warmth of the crowded room. Along the walls on either side of the hall, behind the long dinner tables, the portraits of former professors of St Sophia's looked down on the girls. The stern ones were intimidating. The ones who smiled were downright frightening.

“No,” Kyria warned, when Professor Muston made another attempt to fill Sansa’s glass. Sansa’s hand shot out fast, nearly knocking over the glass. To her left, she heard Elma laugh. And she would have said something - in fact the retort was there, poised on the edge of her tongue, but that something brushed against her legs. She sat up sharply, teeth clamping shut.

“Don’t look down,” a voice warned her.

Sansa took a careful sip of her coffee, and as she lowered her eyes to the cup she caught a glimpse of a grey-black shadow, and of two bright orange eyes, looking up at her.  
Kyria flew to the edge of the table. They both glanced at Old Musty, but the professor was busy talking to her right-hand neighbour, and seemed more than a little drunk besides. Kyria joined Fan beneath the table, and Sansa waited with barely disguised impatience as the two daemons talked among themselves. Once they were done, Fan slunk back under the table, her bushy tail once again stroking Sansa’s legs.

“She says Jon wants to talk,” Kyria said, once he was back on Sansa’s shoulder. “I said we’d meet them in the garden, it’s more discreet than your room. And Jon says you look lovely.”

Sansa’s gaze shot left before she could help it. She found Jon’s grey eyes watching her. The corners of his mouth lifted into another faint smile.

“You’re blushing,” Kyria noted. “Hardly the time, if you ask me...”

“Quiet. You’re not being inconspicuous, either,” Sansa said. Kyria had been pulling at her hair with his tiny claws, grappling with Sansa’s braid as if he were trying to climb his way up her head.

“He’s your cousin,” Kyria reminded Sansa. “It’s a little old-fashioned, don’t you think?”

 

 

The bear king’s roar had echoed across the frost-covered halls of the palace in Svalbard. The bears all stood down at once. The executioner’s blade rung as it hit the icy floor.

“Take him, then,” the bear had rumbled, as Jon rose unsteadily to his feet, unwilling it seemed to believe his luck. “I will forgive his trespass.”

Sansa had stumbled backwards, weak-kneed, her throat hoarse with all the lies and half-truths that she had repeated over and over. In a voice of steel and then in a voice as sweet and soothing as warm honey. _He is my kin, he was looking out for me, he came to find me, he did not intend to trespass upon your territory..._

_He is a scholar, like me, not a hunter, and certainly not a former soldier of the Church and a bastard princeling, whose head would entice you to the Magisterium and to many an opportunistic country._

She’d taken Jon by the hand. They had walked out of the palace and for weeks neither of them had mentioned all that they had to leave behind as they ran away to save his life. Sansa’s research and her careful attempts at taming the irascible bear king, and whatever it was that Jon had been looking for so far north.

When she’d finally asked, he had not been very forthcoming about it. “I heard of a door,” he’d said. “I want to know where it leads.”

 

 

 

 

**3\. The garden folly**

 

Once upon a time, Sansa had waited for a boy in the gardens of an Oxford college. It wasn’t St Sophia’s, and the boy wasn’t half as dangerous as Jon and she didn’t love him half as much.

But the exhilaration had been similar, the tap-tap-tapping of her pulse against her temples and the nerve it took to stay put. She’d had no idea what she was doing. She wanted the boy to come. She wanted to be left alone, because if he did come, she wouldn’t know how to behave. Of course, Kyria had been just as nervous. If they’d been younger, before he’d found his final shape, Kyria’s panic would have manifested in swift shape-shifting. Owl - sparrow - mouse - badger - monkey - bear cub, and back to his favourite shape, a small, caramel-coloured owl. When they’d been children, Jon’s daemon had often been an owl as well, large and white and very quiet.

By the time Sansa went to meet the boy in the college gardens, however, Kyria had settled, and it had felt strange, that day, to be enough of an adult that her daemon couldn’t make an open display of their distress anymore. In this way as in many others, they had had to grow up.

The boy had come, and Sansa had loved him, for a while.

The gardens of St Sophia weren’t as vast as the gardens of other Oxford colleges. There was a pond and a copse of trees and a folly shaped like a temple surrounded by cherry trees.

Sansa walked beneath the arches on the north side of the gardens. Kyria had not given Fan a specific meeting place, but it seemed unlikely there would be anyone else outside at this hour. The air was bitterly cold, and the gardener hadn’t done a good enough job that one could easily navigate the lawn in the dark without falling over a hedge or a protruding root.

“There,” Kyria said.

Sansa’s heart began to race. A shadow stepped away from the folly’s portico, tall and dark under the navy blue sky, and a smaller silhouette followed, bounding down the marble steps in Jon’s wake. Jon looked down at his daemon and they seemed to confer a moment.

Sansa was about to step out to join them when someone beat her to it. Elma’s fair hair seemed to glow in the moonlight. She was still wearing her black gown.

“What is she doing?” Kyria hissed.

Sansa had no answer for him. She watched as Jon and Elma exchanged a few words, and then Elma was taking Jon’s arm - leading him towards a patch of moonlight, talking all the while. Her daemon followed at a slower pace, picking up blades of grass and tossing them away, as if he didn’t feel concerned by Jon and Elma’s conversation.

“I don’t know what game she’s playing, but I’ve had enough,” Sansa decided.

“Be careful.”

“Of what?” She scoffed. “Elma? I’m more than a match for her.”

Kyria made a noncommittal sound. “Just be careful."

And so they kept to the shadows, walking from a low-running wall to an empty fountain and then around it towards where Jon and Elma were now standing, engaged in quiet conversation.

 _Is this why he came?_ Sansa wondered. It made no sense, no sense at all. Jon and a woman? Jon who had told her, quite honestly, during one of the long pale mornings in Trollesund, while they waited for the boat that would take them home, “I have no time for this”?

She was still thinking of that northern morning - cool grey eyes looking up at her, Jon leaning his head back as she brought the blade closer to his neck and prepared to hack at the dark, shaggy tangle of his beard - when she heard a noise she hadn’t heard in months. A silky rustle, the wind rushing along the curved line of a branch of pine. She had not seen any witch up close in the north, but she’d learn to recognise the sound, and to be wary of it. The allegiances of witches shifted from one tribe to the next. Some would let you be, but others might have sided with your enemies, and in a moment of distraction, they would lodge a slender arrow in your neck.

She moved without thinking, springing out of the shadows and throwing her whole weight against Jon, knocking him to the ground.

The arrow sliced through the air, a whistle followed by a sharp thud as the point embedded itself in the wet earth. Somewhere Elma was screaming - a second too late, as if she had just remembered to do so. Jon’s hand hovered above Sansa’s head, fingers brushing against her hair. She was close enough to see the surprise on his face, his grey eyes wide and very bright. His heart thudded quickly against her breast.

“Sansa?”

“Jon!” Fan called.

“In there,” Jon said, and he helped her up in the shadow of the leafless cherry tree, and they both stumbled across the moonlit lawn and into the little temple as another arrow bounced off the marble base of a column.

Elma was gone.

Sansa raised a shaking hand. Kyria came down and Sansa drew back a breath at the familiar, soft brush of feathers against her skin. She hiccuped, not knowing whether this was the onset of a sob or of a nervous fit of laughter.

Meanwhile Fan paced around the circular room. There wasn’t much space to do so. Every few feet, the daemon stopped and perked her ears. But nothing was coming for them, it seemed, and if the witch was still out there, she was biding her time.

“Are you alright?”

Sansa let Jon take her hands and pivot her towards a ray of pallid moonlight. She kept still while he pushed back a strand of hair from her face, and brushed a speck of dust off her cheek.

Then he leaned towards her and briefly touched his lips to hers. “Thank you,” he said. “You saved my life - again.”

Once, Sansa would have played along. Lips shut tight, pretending that this was nothing more than a greeting between cousins, exacerbated perhaps by relief and the giddiness of a lucky escape. Ignoring the recklessness of the impulse and how desperate the short-lived contact had made her feel.

She took a step back, fear and desire clawing at her gut.

The previous time she had been wrapped up in so many furs that her face could barely be seen. Jon had stood against the shimmering green lights of the aurora as he tugged down the fur lining of her hood, hands made clumsy by his mittens. Then as well he’d asked if she was alright, for the first time since they’d left Svalbard. And when Sansa had nodded, he’d whispered his thank yous against her lips.

 _What would they think, in Oxford, if they could see us now?_ Sansa had thought. Less because of the kissing than because of their smelly furs and their snow-matted hair. And then the thought had been swept along the chilly northern wind and she’d considered instead the beauty of the landscape, the black hills that looked half-melted against the green sky and the black shine of the ice.

Kyria moved first. He took a small jump in Fan’s direction, and then another, and another, from one marble tile to the next. Fan lied down, her silver-black head between her paws. With a final hop, Kyria perched upon a black paw and folded his wings. From where Sansa stood he looked like a plump little ball of feathers. He didn’t seem worried in the least about the closeness of Fan’s muzzle, her teeth an inch away from his fragile bird-limbs.

Sansa turned around and found Jon behind her, looking at their daemons with a strange expression. The dark made it hard to tell whether it was confusion or worry. In a way, she could relate to both. Holding her arms out, she let him pull her against him, grateful that for once she was the one whose folly they indulged. Even as he held her, she couldn’t help from letting her eyes stray towards the moonlit garden behind him. Beyond the portico, above the roofs of the college, she could see a triangle of starry sky.

“She won’t come down,” Jon murmured against her hair. “She wouldn’t dare, and even if she did... In close quarters, she’d be at a disadvantage. If Elma went for help...”

“She drew you out." Anger made her voice waver. “She was in on it. I don’t know what they offered her...”

“Riches or her life... It doesn’t matter. She might have gone for help anyways, to try and pretend she had no part in it. We’ll have to wait for now. I’d send Fan ahead, but the door is too far.”

Sansa nodded. Often they had played this game as children, with Jon and her other siblings - sending their daemons away from them, trying to see which one would go the farthest. Often it was Sansa’s younger sister Arya who won. Her daemon would take the shape of a rabbit and move away a leap at a time. But even then it was never very far, a foot further than Bran’s daemon, two feet further than Jon’s. After that, Arya would start clutching her heart and begging Nymeria to come back.

Sansa was well aware that she should get a hold of herself. Focus on the matter at hand, the matter at hand being that a witch had tried to kill Jon. Yet she found it impossible to concentrate, with his hand stroking her hair and the press of his body against hers. It made her want to have and hold him with little regard for the consequences.

She let go of his neck and pushed against his chest, forcing him to take a step back.

“Who is after you? Is it just the one witch, or did she come on behalf of someone else?”

“They sent us north years ago,” Fan said. “Then they decided they didn’t like what we’d found.”

“Who’s they?” Sansa frowned. “The Magisterium?”

“What did you find?” Kyria asked.

“We can’t be sure...,” Jon began.

“Another world,” Fan said. “The door to another world.”

“Fan,” Jon sighed.

“You wanted to tell her,” Fan said. She sounded faintly mocking. “That’s why we came. Because we wanted to tell her. Because we are in...”

“Yes,” Jon interrupted. “Yes, I know.”

“Why did you come?” Sansa asked, her mind still reeling from Fan’s words, from the utter impossibility of them.

Another world.

And yet this was Jon, and Jon wasn’t a liar - except for those times, far and few, when he lied to himself.

“I’ve talked the Royal Arctic Institute and Jordan College into funding another expedition to the north,” Jon said. “I want to go find... What I couldn’t find the previous time. When they caught me.”

“St Sophia won’t give you more money, if that’s what you’re after.”

“I’m not... That’s not why I came,” Jon said. As always when he looked at her, he seemed very earnest, to a point where it became almost uncomfortable to hold his gaze. “I came to ask if you’d come with me. Which I realise now I should have done before I kissed you, so you wouldn’t think...”

“Come... Come with you,” Sansa stammered. “To the north?”

“You were the first person to be a guest of the panserbjørne in fifty years,” Jon said. “You know the way the bears think. And if I’m not mistaken...” She could hear the smile in his voice. “You enjoyed it the last time.”

“What was it that I enjoyed, exactly?” she asked. “Running away from armed men because you made powerful people angry?”

And yet, when she thought about the far away north, this wasn’t what came to mind. In the north the world was clear and infinite and the stars shone. Dogs raced across the icy plain, between the grey-black shadows of the trees. The air was so cold you could taste the ice forming on your tongue. Sansa remembered how Fan would run along the sledge, a graceful streak of black on white. When the daemon grew tired she would jump in and curl up in Jon’s lap, in a tangle of silvery fur and sleepy limbs. Sansa would only have had to pry her hand loose from her furs to touch her black snout. Without the orange eyes, Fan was a shadow, and the taboo didn’t seem so great. If Sansa resisted, it was because of the cold. Ahead of them the lantern shook at the end of its pole. It shed little light and if the dogs had swerved too fast, they would have sent it crashing down, the fire dying in the snow.

There had been no need for light, however. And at some point along the way, between one frozen lake and the next, under a sky that seemed eternal yet elusive - secrets hiding behind the clouds, the stars speaking in ancient tongues - Jon had found Sansa’s gloved hand among the furs. His grip was steady through the layers of leather and wool, and with a whisper like static the aurora had come to life, trailing its tangled ribbons of green across the horizon.

“I did,” Sansa said, her throat suddenly tight. “I did enjoy it.”

Jon gave her another one of his lopsided smiles.

“If tonight is any indication, I wouldn’t survive long without you here to guard me.”

Sansa considered the things she knew about him, from hearsay and from experience. Ruined castles in the east. The boy who loved to fight; the boy who rarely lost a fight. The strange glimmer in his grey eyes when he’d returned from the north the first time, with his talk of bears and witches and green cities in the sky. The boy with the white owl daemon, the man with the silver fox ghosting his steps. Girls twittering like birds. “A real catch”, some said, though others were quick to point out the dangers, too. Royal blood but a dead family, a rich ancestry but no money, powerful friends and equally powerful enemies. A tall stature and a handsome face, a natural ability to make himself heard and, if need be, obeyed. And yet he was often silent and solitary, and all too willing to pull away from an outstretched hand.

She had not forgotten Bran’s reading of the alethiometer, and how according to her younger brother, Sansa’s symbol was the Bird, and Jon’s the Sword.

“What are you thinking about?” Jon touched the red braid where it rested upon her shoulder, a careful, comforting touch, like he might have stroked his daemon.

“Bears,” Sansa said. “You know how most people think the panserbjørne went from grunting to adopting our language.” As always when she began to explain something, she found that it helped her become calmer. Knowledge had always made her feel safe. “In fact, they had their own language, and it had far more to do with their customs and way of life than with ours... And when they swore allegiance to their king, they had this oath.” She pronounced it precisely, with the care she put in all things - pushing the rumbling sounds upwards from her belly and letting them echo in her throat. “The exact meaning would be “against the enemy,”” she explained. “And the word that meant “enemy” in their language was also used for other things... Like “the cold.” Or “war.” And later it came to mean “man” as well.”

“Against the enemy.” Jon attempted to repeat the rumbling sounds. In his lower voice, the pledge sounded weightier, more dangerous perhaps.

In the distance Sansa heard voices, people coming out into the garden.

She repeated the words, holding out her hand. Jon clasped it in a firm grip.

“Is this you pledging allegiance to me, or me to you?” he asked, grey eyes wry.

“To the truth,” Sansa said, thinking of Bran and the alethiometer. “To science, and to the truth.” 

“Very well,” Jon smiled.

His daemon rose from the ground, sending Kyria flying back to Sansa. With what Sansa took to be reckless overconfidence, Jon and Fan ventured out of the temple, their heads lifted towards the dark sky. Across the lawn, people were rushing to meet them. Sansa recognised Dame Olenna’s small but quick-footed figure, and the portly butler in his dressing-robe and the gardener in his pajamas and several female scholars of St Sophia’s, in a disorderly display of dinner-gowns and dressing-robes. Elma brought up the rear, though she was careful to walk where the shadows were darker, along the walls and beneath the branches of the trees.

“As a linguist and a historian, you should know that although words are powerful, they’re hardly binding,” Kyria said.

“They are if you trust the other person,” Sansa said. “And I trust him. Almost as much as I trust you.”

“You know that’s how it starts.” Kyria’s voice was light, teasing. “A man and a woman fall in love with each other, and then they fall in love with knowledge, and the world falls apart.”

Sansa ran a soothing finger over his pale breast.

“That’s not how I remember that story.”

Stepping out onto the steps, and with the sky stretching wide above her, it was suddenly easier to believe that these were the same stars that she’d seen in the north. Steady like a compass needle, a map to guide herself by.

“They left the garden,” she said. “They saw the world at last.”

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I purposefully chose not to give wolf daemons to Jon, Sansa and Bran. I didn’t like the idea of their daemons having the same shape. Additionally, in His Dark Materials your daemon is often of the opposite sex, so I didn’t go with female!Lady and male!Ghost. (I did, however, cheat with the names. Sansa’s daemon is male but called Kyria, which is the Greek for Lady? Jon’s daemon is Fan, short for Fantasma.)
> 
> This is what a [snow bunting](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0f/Plectrophenax_nivalis1.jpg) looks like. And a [black fox](https://leerentz.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/mount_rainier_longmire-128.jpg).


End file.
